Happy 200th, Harriet Tubman

Anthropology professor will present her latest archaeological findings in event celebrating the birth of “the Underground Railroad’s best conductor”

For the first time since Julie Schablitsky and her team successfully discovered the home of Harriet Tubman’s father, Ben Ross, the Department of Anthropology adjunct assistant professor will be speaking this week about that process. 

At 11 a.m. on Saturday, March 12, Schablitsky—who serves as the Maryland Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) chief archaeologist and cultural resources head—will deliver an in-person presentation at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park’s visitor center. The event is part of the weeklong celebration Governor Larry Hogan recently encouraged Marylanders to attend. This will follow a Thursday, March 10 event virtually hosted by UMD’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, “Reclaiming Histories | Creating Futures.” 

“I plan to specifically discuss how we found this ‘needle in a haystack’—the Ben Ross site that was, in a way, lost in time in a swamp in Dorchester County—and from there, what we were able to learn from that site, and what is to come,” Schablitsky said. “We aren’t done excavating, so there is so much more to learn. We aren't really in the ‘this is what we’ve learned’ phase, we are in the ‘this is what we are learning’ phase. We are learning what kind of buildings they lived in based on what’s left behind, we are learning how big the buildings were, we’re learning what they ate, etc.”

By “they,” Schablitsky isn’t only referring to Ben Ross and Harriet Tubman. She’s referring to the roughly 40 other enslaved people that lived in slave quarters on Anthony Thompson’s 1,000-acre property. In addition to Ross’s site, Schablitsky’s team found one site “still pretty intact,” and they’re planning on spending the remainder of this month going back to the property and trying to determine who lived there.

The artifacts they’ve found on the property so far—including a silver alloy coin minted in 1808, nails, tobacco pipes, ceramic dish fragments, and a button—will be on display at the visitor center for the remainder of the month as well, before they head back to MDOT’s Baltimore archaeology lab. The hope is that they will soon be joined by other artifacts, as soil conditions and sea-level rise are already making the team’s excavation efforts extremely difficult. 

“We will dig down half a foot, and our holes will already be inundated from the ground water coming up through the test unit,” said Schablitsky, who plans to spend summer/fall excavating both the Ben Ross site and the unidentified slave quarters.

Still, despite the challenges the area brings, the wetlands are a part of Harriet Tubman’s story that Schablitsky hopes event attendees will appreciate. 

“Harriet Tubman grew up in a really unique place, and I hope that people take away the fact that while she was, against all odds, a ‘she-ro,’ she was helped by people in her family,” Schablitsky said. “Her experiences being rented out to various slave owners over time as well as her experiences with her father in this rustic part of Dorchester County—navigating the wetlands, being responsible for catching muskrats in the swamps—really gave her all the tools to be successful in bringing so many people to freedom.” 

Main photo of a young Harriet Tubman is courtesy of the Library of Congress' "Free to Use and Reuse" page.

Published on Tue, Mar 8, 2022 - 11:28AM